The Fourth Annual Boole Lecture in Informatics takes place on Monday,
20 February 2006 in UCC. This year's speaker is Professor Alan
Bundy, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh who will deliver
a lecture titled "A Very Mathematical Dilemma".
According to Professor Bundy, "Mathematics is facing a dilemma at its
heart: the nature of mathematical proof. We have known since Turing
showed that mathematical provability was undecidable, that there are
theorems with short statements, but with only enormous proofs. Within
the last half century we have discovered practical examples of such
theorems: the classification of all finite simple groups, the Four
Colour Theorem and Kepler's Conjecture. These theorems were only proved
with the aid of a computer. But computer proof is very controversial,
with many mathematicians refusing to accept a proof that has not been
thoroughly checked and understood by a human. The choice seems to be
between either abandoning the investigation of theorems with only
enormous proofs or changing traditional mathematical practice to
include computer-aided proofs. Or is there a way to make large computer
proofs more accessible to human mathematicians?"
Professor Bundy has been at the University of Edinburgh since 1971
initially as a research fellow before going on to become professor in
1990. From 1998-2001 he was Head of the newly-formed of Division
(subsequently School) of Informatics at Edinburgh. His research
has entailed the building of a number of problem solving programs for
different branches of mathematics, namely number theory, algebra,
mechanics, ecological modelling and logic/functional programming.
Professor Bundy is the author of a book on the automation of
mathematical reasoning, the editor of three books on artificial
intelligence and joint author of one book on ecological modelling and
one on the social impact of knowledge-based. He is also the sole
or joint author of over 170 published papers and books. In 1986 he
received the SPL Insight Award for his contribution to artificial
intelligence research and was elected a founding Fellow of AAAI in
1990, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1996, a founding
fellow of AISB in 1997, a founding fellow of ECCAI in 1999, a fellow of
the British Computer Society in 2004 and a fellow of the Institute of
Electrical Engineers in 2005.
The Annual Boole Lecture Series in Informatics was established and is
sponsored by the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics, the Cork
Constraint Computation Centre, the Department of Computer Science, and
School of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics.
The lecture takes place on Monday, 20 February at 8pm in Boole I
Lecture Theatre, UCC. Members of the public are invited to attend
and admission is free.
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